Ignatius of Loyola and C.S. Lewis in Dialogue on Discernment

Reading C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters alongside Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises and Rules for the Discernment of Spirits, this paper argues that Lewis's fictional correspondence between the demon Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood dramatizes, in narrative form, the same diabolic strategies that Ignatian discernment is designed to unmask and resist. Using narrative-critical categories of character, setting, and reader sympathy, the author shows how the novel's unnamed “patient” undergoes a struggle of temptation and grace analogous to the movements of the Exercises, and proposes that such literary works constitute a valuable “first-order” language capable of preparing readers for direct encounter with the Mystery that theology articulates more discursively.